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Making the Training Function Return on the Investment

Monthly Archives: January 2016

Every company that employs people should be training these people in the skills necessary to perform their job responsibilities, Right? Well evidently it is no longer necessary to develop the whole individual, and most companies only develop an occasional skill. Sadly, there are an awful lot of companies that believe training development is Not Needed at all!

Look at your own company. Do they have methods, workshops and programs to develop all of the skills you need? Or do they leave it up to you to obtain the skills yourself? And when people fail to perform their jobs, are they quickly terminated in the hope of finding a replacement that can do the job, again without training?

I have spent the last 10 years consulting with companies about improving their training function. I’ve learned a simple truth about which companies put a value in the learning function and which ones do not. It all begins and ends with the personal experience of senior leadership and the impact of training on their careers.

When a leader can tie their success to the effects of corporate training to their ability to rise up, get promoted and perform well, they are avid supporters of continuing training in their company. Those that feel they got to where they are on their own efforts likewise feel that everyone should rise up the corporate ladder with the same path. And while I can understand this kind of support, it does not mean that it is the right reason to proceed with either path.

What leaders need to realize is that training is an investment in your people. If you provide poor training or even zero training, the odds of you getting a return on that investment are also poor to zero. When you invest in accountable training that targets specific skill development, it has a better chance of producing the return you need for success.

Today’s millennial generation is receiving far less training than their parents did, and are even beginning to obtain leadership roles. Unless they see a value in training development, I am predicting that training will continue to recede into the history books of corporate strategies for success.

Training Development is needed in every company, but for how much longer will that be the prevailing school of thought?

In many corporate environments today there has been a relatively obscure learning technique being used that I only recently discovered, and I am calling it Learning Through Osmosis.

It involves a process similar in nature to on-the-job training without all the formal checklists and is customized by the learner themselves. It produces random, unidentifiable results, but the costs to implement are next to nothing. This gives the person tracking the ROI an easy formulation since any return is positive since the investment was nothing.

After 25+ years banging my head against a wall designing, facilitating and performing detailed training needs analysis before implementing any kind of learning solution I have come to learn that many “training professionals” have been getting a salary and not having to lift a finger in implementing squat! I feel like such an out of touch idiot for not discovering Learning Through Osmosis sooner.

So what exactly is Learning Through Osmosis? It begins by removing all structure to learning, and allowing all employees to discover their own learning paths. It requires no eLearning, online or classroom training and two simple resources. The first is an unfettered access to the complete internet. What is on the internet is completely correct I am told, and you can find out how to do anything! Sweet!

The second resource is other people, and where most of the learning occurs through the osmosis process. You see all that is necessary is the ability to stand near (not even close enough to touch) the person that actually knows how to perform the tasks you want to learn, and through the science of osmosis, these skills are developed by the learner without taking away the skills from the original owner. It is almost like magic!

Now while the true secret for how this process moves skills from one person to another person without any kind of old fashion training techniques is unknown, many training leaders are trusting the process and have abandoned all other training events and put all of their hope in Learning Through Osmosis. As long as their paycheck comes every two weeks, they are certain in their success. And if that is the only way you measure training results, then you are good to go, right?

NOTE:

The above insight is my sense of humor, and attempt to figure out why some organizations fail to provide accountable training solutions and ignore employee development. Learning Through Osmosis is NOT a real training method, and should never be relied on for any professional development.